There’s a famous story of a rabbi watching a tightrope
walker performing his acrobatic act between two very tall buildings. The rabbi watched
him from his place on the street for a long time, over an hour, until some
passersby asked the rabbi why he was staring at this acrobat, rather than doing
something ‘important’.

The rabbi looked at them and said, “I’m absolutely amazed by
this man. How does he do it?” So the rabbi waited for the acrobat to come down
from his high wire, approached him and said, “I’ve been watching you for hours.
It’s amazing that anyone would devote themselves to something like this. What’s
your secret: how do you not fall?” The tightrope walker thought for a moment
and said: “there is no trick to this. I can only look in front of me and go
forward. If I think about what’s behind me, I’ll slip and fall. If I think
about the rope, or my balance, or falling, I’ll fall. If I think about the
money I’m earning, I’ll lose my concentration, and fall. I can only look ahead
and move one step at a time toward my goal. It is in that way that I survive.”

This is my fourth Rosh Hashanah here at Congregation Beth
Emeth. It’s also my 10th High Holidays since my ordination as a
rabbi at the Plum St. Temple in Cincinnati. (I know, I’m surprised too.) And as
this anniversary approached I began to think more and more about what I’d
learned, about what it meant for me to be here. And as I thought about my time
here, I thought more and more about the story of the tightrope walker. For the
rabbinate—really, all of life—is a kind of tightrope, a kind of acrobatic act,
and while the stakes are a lot lower—for most of us, failure in an activity
doesn’t mean literally breaking our necks!—there is still that sense of trying
to maintain my balance, at least for me.

So, permit me to spend a little time working through the
words of the rabbi as a way of sharing my learning, how I understand us, what
I’ve learned in this place, four high holidays on.

First: you can’t think about what’s behind. You and I know
how hard this is to do. We live all our lives looking over our shoulders,
living in retrospect. One of my first rabbinic conferences I stopped by the table
where my parents and their friends, my dad’s classmates were dining. It quickly
occurred to me that they were swapping jokes and stories that were seemingly
unchanged from my dad’s ordination. In that moment, they were a bunch of
rabbinic students hanging out in the Bumming Room (yes, that was the name of
the room, and it was actually named after a guy named Bumming, I’m not making
this up). A few years later I was at a different conference, and I discovered
that my classmates and I were swapping stories and jokes that dated back to my
ordination.

We think backwards. Just think of your home, the mementos
from places you’ve traveled, photos from family vacations. Marisa and I are
‘stuff’ people: we are surrounded by things and have attachment to things that
remind us of this or that gathering or moment in our lives. On top of that, I
have an excellent memory, which means that when we ask Elishai to make a pile
of toys he wants to donate, he dutifully picks up stuff he doesn’t play with
anymore, unremorsefully, while I muse on who gave him that toy car, the first
time he played with that puzzle.

While it’s wonderful to reminisce, and sometimes quite
important to remember (we are commanded to do so repeatedly in Torah), it’s
also true that memory or history can hold us back, keep us from walking across
the tightrope. We fetishize our past, and if you don’t believe me, look at any
Norman Rockwell piece, or ask my father about the contents of his father’s
furniture store that we inherited, including the fire extinguisher, a giant,
dusty red thing, which sat in our garage ready to be used for 30 years. I can
assure you that no matter how much my father loved my grandfather, that fire
extinguisher was not going to do a whole lot of good when the need arose. To paraphrase
our prayerbook: the past can only tell us who we were, it cannot tell us who we
are meant to be. And as Jews—Reform Jews especially—it is our task to move
forward, to progress, to not be
satisfied with what was. Therefore, the pictures of the confirmation classes on
our walls are meaningful not only because they allow past generations of
students to muse over their youth and ill-thought-out hairstyles, but because
they inspire future generations as well. The chair from the old Washington
Street Temple Bimah found new life, first as the Twinning Chair and now as our
Kisei Eliahu, our Elijah’s chair for brises and baby namings; but in between
those uses it sat unloved and unattended in a storage area. It is good to
lovingly remember the old sanctuary, but to cast the new one as lacking while
failing to remember how the heater noisily interrupted every bar mitzvah (when
it worked at all) is an act of idol worship. The past is a helpful guide, but
only when it inspires us to move forward, not when it holds us back.

Second: you can’t think about the rope, the balance, or the
possibility of falling. The devil, we
are told, is in the details, and too be sure we spend a lot of time going over
the details of every little thing in our lives and in this congregation. And
details are a necessary and important part of our lives. It’s hard to get
through our days on banal generalities, though apparently it is possible to run
for office on them. One year, here at the high holidays, I got confused as to
which Torah was rolled to the right section. It was brought out, placed on this
lectern, the Torah readers brought up…and suddenly we realized we were staring
at a lovely bit of Torah that would have been perfect for some other holiday.
Thankfully Cantor Stanton swapped scrolls while I stalled, explaining the
portion ad nauseum, and probably most people didn’t notice, but it was a
reminder of the importance of details.

That said, we can get ourselves lost in the details as well.
Years ago I did a wedding for a young couple who looked and felt radiant: they
were so excited to begin this life stage together, so excited to be celebrating
with family and friends—until the bride noticed she had spilled the tiniest
drop of something on the bodice of her her ivory dress. It was nearly invisible
to the naked eye—you had to look at it with an electron microscope to notice
it—but like George’s sweater with the red dot from Seinfeld, she couldn’t take her eyes off of it. And of course, this
was right before the processional, literally moments from when we were supposed
to walk beneath the chuppah. “Rabbi”
she wailed, “My dress is ruined! What do I do?” At which I looked at her, smiled,
put her hand in the hand of her groom and said, “sweetie, you go out there and
get married.” That one, unnoticeable
detail was about to ruin her ability to have any sense of perspective, and as a
result ruin her wedding day. Instead, she moved forward, and two kids and many
sleepless nights later, she and her groom are still happily together, her stained
dress sitting in a closet, a good punchline at family get togethers. Details are important, details are necessary, but they must
not be used as a drag on our hopes or aspirations. So often we hear the
question, “how are we going to do X?” be it a project, a program, a course, a
service. “How are we going to publicize, and deal with this detail, and this
safety concern, and this piece and that piece?” To borrow the title of a book,
the answer to how is yes. If attention to detail—talk of the rope, the height,
the balance—stymies, encourages passive behavior, or blame, or compels us to
undermine someone’s efforts for whatever reason, then we need to rethink our
efforts and our commitments to each other. But if we can say, “we will find a
solution to these issues and we will move forward together”, then we restore
balance for ourselves and each other.

Third and finally: one step at a time. It sounds both a lot
slower and a lot easier than you might think. This year we bid farewell to Neil
Armstrong, a person who took what was, seemingly, an easy step—he merely walked
backwards off a ladder. Never mind that the ladder led to the lander “Eagle”
and it took 3 days traveling through space to be able to take that step! But
Armstrong himself never liked being called the first man to step on the moon;
he much preferred to be the first person the land on the moon, to steer the spacecraft safely upon lunar soil,
always the test pilot.

And of course, before he could steer the craft that led to
the step, there was the trip itself, the launch, the hours and days and months
and years testing and re-testing equipment, experimenting, training pilots and
astronauts, calculating courses and trajectories and planning, planning,
planning. It was never one small step, or a giant leap; it was always hundreds
of thousands of pieces culminating in that triumphant moment. There
were plenty of reasons not to go
ahead. NASA couldn’t be certain of what would happen, whether the equipment
would work, whether there was enough fuel. Despite the rose-colored hue of
history, there was NOT general consensus in the US that we should spend that
kind of money on this adventure. At any point, a politician could have pulled
funding, an astronaut could have pulled out of the program due to an
appreciation of his own mortality, or, as John Glenn called it, that pile of
‘low bids’ could have just exploded. And yet, the leadership, the scientists,
the pilots, the engineers all had the vision to move forward, to take those
thousands of tasks upon themselves so Armstrong could take his giant leap.

Life is an adventure, and putting one foot in front of the
other takes effort and a willingness to take risks. Just as every step the
tightrope walker takes could be his last, so too every action we take is a
choice with consequences; once we choose one path, the other disappears from
our view. Just as Armstrong’s Giant Leap was really the culmination of all
kinds of other activity, so too are our lives and our actions, our choices; one
built upon the other.

So, what are the implications in terms of congregational
life? First, it means that, while we respect our history, we are not beholden
to it. With deep appreciation for what those who came before us did, we must
chart our own course in order to create meaningful community. Otherwise, we’re
a museum, a fossil. Second, it means that we must be willing to take risks, to
be willing to experiment, to make mistakes, to be forgiving of those mistakes,
and work together to work out the details. Nothing emerges fully formed, like
Athena from Zeus’ head; it requires real effort, and working together to create the kind of community
we want. Finally, we must have the vision in order to move forward, even if moving forward is hard, even if
moving forward isn’t always popular.

How
do we do this? We do it together. As you may have noticed, you received a
sticker, or have seen car magnets or other paraphernalia with the Beth Emeth
Crown and the word “B’yachad”, which means Together. Congregational life is
different from the high-wire act in one respect; we don’t take it alone. We do
it in community, but community is more than just paying a fee (though there are
some who may feel that is enough already!). it means making a commitment to
your fellow congregants to meaningfully engage, regardless of age, gender or
experience. It doesn’t matter if you’ve always been Jewish or have come to
Judaism but recently, or have not yet chosen Judaism. It doesn’t matter if you
are my son’s age or my father’s age or my grandmother’s age. It doesn’t matter
if your life is busy now, or was busy with the life of the synagogue before. It
doesn’t matter if you’ve belonged to this congregation for a month or a hundred
years. What matters is that we are here, all of us. Our leadership has a vision,
one that I share: of intergenerational programming, bringing us all together in
learning, in social justice, in tzedakah,
in community, in worship and sharing our lives together. That means
experimenting with different kinds of programming and asking people to step
forward out of their comfort zones. It means remembering our history and our
tradition but moving forward to answer the needs of today for our congregants
of all ages and backgrounds. It means moving forward aware of the details but
not stymied by them. It means having a spirit of adventure about our Judaism,
about this congregation and our place within it. No tricks, no gimmicks; just
keeping our balance moving one foot in front of the other. Because, as my
teacher Michael Walzer reminds all of us in Mishkan
T’fillah:
wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;, that there is a better place… a
promised land; “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” And There is no way to get from here
to thereExcept by joining together and
marching. B’yachad, all of us marching together. May this be God’s will, may
this be our action, Amen!

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About Me

I'm blessed to serve as spiritual leader and teacher of an historic and dynamic Reform Jewish congregation, the only one in the state of Delaware. My hope is to make Torah study, worship and music and community accessible, meaningful and engaging. My family, especially my wife and toddler son, continuously bring me joy and inspiration.